The Discovery and Settlement of Iceland
Overview
Iceland is the only European country whose history has a definite beginning. Norwegian outlaws, exiles, and adventurers began to settle this previously uninhabited land about 874. In 930 they established what is at the dawn of the twenty-first century the oldest parliamentary democracy in the world.
Background
The first visitors to Iceland may have been Romans but were probably Irish. The kayaks and umiaks of the Inuit could not have traveled as far as Iceland from Greenland or North America. Roman and early British records refer to a place called "Thule" or "Ultima Thule," which must have been Iceland. A very few Irish monks lived in Iceland in the eighth and ninth centuries, as the Irish monk Dicuil stated in 825 in Liber de mensura orbis terrae (Book of measuring the circle of the world), but they had either abandoned this refuge or been driven out by the time the Norse settlement began in the 870s.
About 850, a Swedish Viking named Naddoddur was blown off course west of the Faroe Islands and landed in the east fjords of Iceland, which he named "Snowland." Supposedly he was the first Scandinavian to see Iceland.
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